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Explore the ways LGBTQ+ artists have expressed gender, sexuality, and identity in the vast world of queer culture.
Chicago has long been a city that fosters and inspires artists, from students who are just starting their careers to acclaimed painters and sculptors. And the present day is no exception—the contemporary artists who call Chicago home make the city a vibrant community that welcomes creativity and big ideas. This tour, featuring a rotating selection of works created since 1990, showcases just a few of the many contemporary Chicago artists whose works are in the museum’s collection.
A constellation of exhibitions and events at the Art Institute and across the city that explore ideas around freedom, solidarity, and place from artists throughout Africa and the African diaspora.
Asian, Asian American, and Pacific Islander American (A/AAPI) artists continue to push the contemporary art landscape across a variety of media—architecture, design, installation art, painting, photography, printmaking, sculpture, and textiles.
Best known as the photographer of the “Black is Beautiful” movement, Brathwaite created images that were inspired by jazz and popular music of the 1960s and 1970s.
Part of this photograph’s power lies in the deterioration that seems to threaten it, as if the image were going to disappear soon.
The photographer feels “a calming sense of security, as if visiting my ancestral home,” when looking at the sea, a feeling that resonates with others who have crossed their waters.
Since its invention in the 19th century, photography has both engaged with and changed the world.
A roster of prominent artists, curators, and scholars offers a new approach to our understanding of photography and media
This publication celebrates, and expands upon, the 2018 exhibition Never a Lovely So Real: Photography and Film in Chicago, 1950–1980, which presented the work of practitioners across the city who vividly captured the spirit of their communities.
The first in-depth treatment in fifteen years, this handsome and important book examines Morell’s career to the present day, including his earlier works in black-and-white and never before published color photographs from the past decade.
This teaching packet includes an essay, discussion questions, activity ideas, a glossary, and images of three photographs from Dawoud Bey’s first significant body of work.
Barbara Kruger is known for works that provocatively integrate photographs and text. Her art reveals and challenges the ways in which images used in the commercial media often perpetuate stereotypes, objectify women, and encourage conformity.
Explore The Return of Odysseus (Homage to Pinturicchio and Benin) by artist Romare Bearden. Engage in slow looking, learn about Bearden and his work, and get new ideas for your own art making.
Learn about Black culture on Chicago’s South Side in the 1970s through Mikki Ferrill’s photographic project, The Garage (1970–80).
